User talk:Erxnmedia/Archive 5

Reversion (law)

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Proposed deletion of Change of variables (PDE)

A proposed deletion template has been added to the article Change of variables (PDE), suggesting that it be deleted according to the proposed deletion process. All contributions are appreciated, but this article may not satisfy Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion, and the deletion notice should explain why (see also "What Wikipedia is not" and Wikipedia's deletion policy). You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{dated prod}} notice, but please explain why you disagree with the proposed deletion in your edit summary or on its talk page.

Please consider improving the article to address the issues raised because even though removing the deletion notice will prevent deletion through the proposed deletion process, the article may still be deleted if it matches any of the speedy deletion criteria or it can be sent to Articles for Deletion, where it may be deleted if consensus to delete is reached. Ryan Reich (talk) 01:18, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Your conduct

The discussion about change of variables is clearly over, both because I have nothing to say anymore and because I have lost my curiosity about what additional sarcastic vignette you can deliver in reply to my next response. To date, the discussion has seen: WP:Phenomenological; "Since you are more educated on this topic" (in response to no such claim); "a technique which you may consider so obvious it doesn't even need to be discussed" (in response to nothing); the totally uncalled-for snipe about commentary and the coffee lounge; "talking into air"; and the rhetorical question about referreeing an article for JAMS, which I take to be sarcasm since my user page clearly states that I'm in the middle of grad school. Whatever the particulars of the discussion, in this matter engaging with you has been a distinct displeasure, and it made you look like a fool where you could have looked like an authority or at least a reasonable person. I advise you to overcome your impulsiveness and grow up. Ryan Reich (talk) 03:42, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi Ryan,

I admit, it's been too funny. That said, let me respond to a few of your points:

1. As a 2nd-year math grad student at Harvard, trust me, you are more educated than me on this topic, without a doubt.
2. By trying to delete the topic to begin with, you clearly indicated that you didn't think the topic was worth discussing.
3. In another context with another math grad student from Harvard, that person made it clear that he didn't think it was worth observing, in an article about orthogonal matrices Q, that such matrices preserve inner product in the sense that $\langle u,v\rangle =\langle Qu,Qv\rangle$. I have gone through the proof of this simple-to-state identity, and I found that a rigorous proof (as best I could do it) actually involved about 20 or 30 steps. So I got the impression that math grad students from Harvard (and maybe math grad students from U. of Iowa) are inculcated in a sense of embarassment at ever having to state the apparently obvious, and at ever having to show more in a proof that is absolutely necessary to given another equally trained mathematician a sense that they might actually be able to work out the full proof, if they had to. By referring to the classroom, coffee lounge and advisor's office, I was referring to exactly those settings you are likely to encounter during your education where you will be likely to be even remotely comfortable in exposing your lack of understanding of a given topic.
4. You stated in the discussion that you were unwilling to be enlisted to improve the article itself. How I am not "talking into air" once you have made that decision, since I already know at that point that you will do nothing constructive to improve the article?
5. I have no wish to be considered either an authority or a reasonable person. In the context of this article, I wish the text itself on the topic given to be considered on it's own merits, regardless of why I put it there to begin with. To be honest with you, the article itself was a product of my doing a self-assigned homework problem in a book I was reading on PDEs using Mathematica by Vvedensky. In one of the introductory problems, he gives some Mathematica code to do change of variable for PDE. I stared at this code for quite awhile trying to think about where it was coming from and what it meant and how it worked in general. I also Googled change of variable for PDE and found a number of brief, light treatments, but nothing that really hit the spot. Then I wrote the article, in the hopes that someone with more education would confirm my understanding. You have the education, but you haven't really confirmed my understanding or provided any additional enlightment. That makes me sad, I would have loved to go to Harvard. Now I'm not so sure!

Thanks,

Erxnmedia (talk) 19:04, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

You can justify your words, but you can't make them not sarcastic. As for the justifications, for your having continually protested that intentions are irrelevant and only article content matters, all these barbs were dug into the flesh of my personal motivations. You make a lot of assumptions about me; one of the most damaging appears to be that since I am a student at a school you clearly esteem for the quality of its mathematics, I must know a lot about everything mathematical. This really isn't true; math is so specialized and my specialty so far from PDEs that you probably know more than I do about them. Calling me out is a better tactic for a political debate than a scholarly one. You also seem to be judging me by your experience with someone else, with whom my only connection is where we are students. Some of what you say is true, and some of it seems to be a stereotype of graduate students, mathematicians, or academics in general (I won't say which is which).

As for being a reasonable person, I don't know why you wouldn't want to be one. I know, we all play this game here on Wikipedia that the highest ideal is the Improvement of the Encyclopedia, but there isn't anyone who doesn't see the way to doing that through an eyeglass of their own making. There are the deletionists and inclusionists you mentioned, the populists who think the best encyclopedia is the one that teaches the most people the most things the best, the elitists who think we need to give a complete treatment of some specialist topic they like (but damn the high school kids who just want to learn how to do trig substitutions for their homework), and so on. If you put a populist and an elitist, or an inclusionist and a deletionist, on the same talk page, they will condemn each other's work until the end of time and think they're keeping the agents of the devil from despoiling the encyclopedia. If anything is to be done, someone has to have the perspective to pitch his position to the other person's interests and make that person agree that it actually is in the best interests of the encyclopedia as they see them to write about the technical aspects of polynomial algebras, for example. Yes, you want the text judged on its own merits...by your standards. You need to make your opponents accept those standards.

Ryan Reich (talk) 22:01, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi Ryan,

I don't think anybody should be admitted into any mathematics graduate program in any specialized area without having mastered the following subjects, even if they prove or seem to be irrelevant to a topic such as polynomial algebra:

• Calculus of the 1,2,3 variety
• Ordinary differential equations
• Partial differential equations
• Linear algebra
• Introductory symbolic logic
• Introductory number theory
• Abstract algebra and maybe a hint of category theory but not too much
• Probability theory and related methods (generating functions)
• Statistics
• Combinatorics

I'm leaving out topology, real and complex analysis, and a few other topics which I think build on the above.

So I'm actually disappointed that you can get (a) to Harvard math grad school and (b) to 2nd year of Harvard math grad school, without having mastered the above topics to the advanced undergraduate level. And I would hope that in a decent undergraduate preparation that passed through PDEs, that there would be a solid discussion of change of variable.

This is not your fault: It is the fault of the faculty at Harvard, for not making this clear.

You may object that polynomial algebra or any of a thousand other specialized topics don't need a grounding in the above subjects. I think that most if not all of the specialized topics, at least the ones that survive, originate in applications of the above basics or attempts to abstract or generalize from them. So if you haven't mastered the basics of what might be called "applied math", I think you may run dry in some ways in the more specialized topics that seem very distant from applied math.

For example, a polynomial algebra, since renamed by other restless Wikipedians to be a symmetric algebra, is a universal enveloping algebra which is an associative algebra which is a vector space. Vector spaces are the basic object of study in linear algebra, which happens to be in my list above!

Thanks, Erxnmedia (talk) 13:26, 22 July 2008 (UTC)